jwenting

Phil Deakins wrote: There's another possible reason for sub-dividing land into unuseable chunks and then abandoning it - to discourage anyone from buying it, so that LL doesn't get tier on it. In two steps, I went from a whole mainland sim down to a quarter sim plus the 10% group bonus. I abandoned the land I got rid of so that LL would earn less tier. If I'd sold it, LL would actually gain tier, so I abandoned it. I hadn't thought of also cutting it up into unuseable chunks to discourage people from buying it or I might have done it. Yes, I do dislike LL the company that much. typical hater response. If you hate LL so much you want to "punish" them in such a way, why do you keep your premium account, why indeed to you stay in SL at all and don't vote with your feet by leaving us all in peace and taking your business elsewhere? You're just as much a griefer as those kids launching lag attacks to crash sims.

Griffin Ceawlin wrote: Warning: If you downgrade to a basic account, you will lose all the land you own, and you will no longer have access to your weekly Linden dollar stipend or live chat support. Make sure to sell all your land before you downgrade! You may also wish to check your group land contributions and make arrangements to keep your group's land holdings in good standing. http://community.secondlife.com/t5/English-Knowledge-Base/Premium-membership/ta-p/1054477 I would point out that where it says "land" it refers to "mainland". . not just mainland, also private estates you purchased from LL (rather than renting from an estate agent) will be removed (and that means removed, not just cleared and marked abandoned) when you stop being premium.

Keera Woyseck wrote: Stuck in the stone ages are we jwenting?? Comeing from someone who is 6 months old? You apparenty base your very limited knowledge of veteran SLers on a very small number of people. . ah, hit a nerve there. And didn't even address anyone in particular Never said ALL old users fall into that category, just enough it is striking. But of course in your hatred for newer people you never even tried to comprehend that.

if your neighbours don't respond the remove the boxes, AR them. As estate owner your ticket will be given more weight. LL is correct that such things should be handled between land owners if possible.

Mesh looking different in your modelling tool as compared to in-world can be due to any number of factors, most likely scaling/sizing. Nothing can be done about that except possibly increase the density of the mesh you export (which makes it larger, heavier, laggier, and may well increase the land impact if it's going to be rezzed). Don't know about the uploader, may well be the same thing: people trying to upload very high density, very large meshes that simply overtax the system. Maybe there's some undocumented (or poorly documented) upper limit to the mesh size and complexity that can be used, for performance reasons, and you're hitting that. Pathfinding AFAIK was well tested, but the only viewer to support it at the time was a beta release of V3. At the moment V3 and Firestorm support it in the latest versions, no other viewer (to the best of my knowledge). That's no fault of LL, the specs were out there, viewer creators just didn't implement them yet/timely enough. And without the viewer optimisation, there are performance problems, that's a given. "veteran" residents stuck in the stone ages, refusing to upgrade their viewers past V1 (or old versions of Phoenix), often refusing to even acknowledge the existence of anyone younger than several years in SL are indeed a big problem. It's simple elitism, and something I've seen time and time again in other online communities as well. Those old residents don't help new residents anyway, so learning to use a new viewer to help people is no priority for them (and if they do "help" someone, it's by ranting to them how bad sl is, how terrible V2/V3 and their derived 3rd party viewers are, and how old versions of Phoenix are the only ones you should use). There is a solution to the viewer thing, and that's to disallow (rather than discourage) any viewer older than say a year to log in on the grid. Won't cure the poisonous attitude towards newer members of those dinosaurs, but will force them to use viewers capable of seeing what the rest of us see so they're not going to AR every new avatar wearing mesh in a PG zone for being naked (which now happens at times). Marketplace works reasonably well, but could indeed be improved. Search works but is primitive, and looks like it's easily abused by unscrupulous vendors to get their products listed in unlrelated searches. Pretty similar to Google in that. It's not perfect, but functional.

Griffin Ceawlin wrote: zwagy wrote: Teh only way I"ve seen so far to buy or sell land on here is to have a premium account, other thtan e-bay, but maybe I've not looked far enough. You can buy all the virtual (main)land that you can find for sale on eBay, but unless you have a Premium account, you can't own it (unless you buy a private region, and good luck getting it actually delivered to you...). Correct. Anything you buy on eBay is not yours in-world until the current owner transfers ownership to you. And as said, good luck getting that to happen. Sounds like a very easy scam, use a bot to make eBay accounts, harvest some nice looking parcel names from SL's Google map and post them on eBay (never mind you don't own them, you never intend to deliver anyway), then cash the money before the complaints roll in and eBay tries to recover the money (not for you, Paypal transactions are not insured, they keep it for themselves) and blocks off the PP and eBay accounts.

so nice of you to mention those parcels are open water

have to wonder. Never noticed places like that... Few annoying adboards scattered around the mainland making neighbouring parcels impossible to use (because they're right in the middle of them more often than not) but that's the worst of it. Of course there's some stores that are densely packed with poorly scripted vendors that cause lag, and sims lagging themselves to death (and annoying the visitors) with huge megamalls they force visitors to walk through for 10 minutes before they get to the actual sim entrance, but those are easy to avoid.

Sithiaven wrote: I must be doing something right, going to the right places as I have yet to exsperience any sort of griefing in my 7 months. I go club hopping, shopping and general exploring, but the welcome hubs, info hubs is one place I have no desire to hang out at. Way to many people that think they are interesting, but really have nothing to hold my interest. Just go to any public sandbox to build something or whatever for more than about half an hour and you'll get hit by at least one of them... Same with any of the newbie friendly help/orientation sims on the destination guide. I work as a helper at some of them, most get several griefers a day, but at one they're at times banning several each hour. Seems timezone dependent as well, highest density comes during the US afternoons (European night, Asian morning). Could indicate they're mostly concentrated in certain geographic areas.

is it worth it? In a small way it helps LL run the grid. That alone makes it worth it to me. Also, when and if you need support and need it quick, it's invaluable. The free land and home is a nice to have, a little place to call your own you'd otherwise pay dearly for (rentals of roughly equivalent size skyboxes can be up to a thousand L$ a week). All in all, once I knew I'd be around SL for quite a while to come, it was a no-brainer for me.

Viewer 3 is quite intuitive, thank you very much. Of course the dinosaurs constantly complain about it not being identical to Viewer 1, which was terrible. Most people don't read documentation anyway, so the wiki and other sources go unused (but true, some better organisation there would be nice). Having worked in customer support, 90%+ of questions and complaints were caused by an unwillingness to read documentation and/or follow tutorials and every new SL user starts in a tutorial sim, or should (sometimes when you crash for example right after account creation you start at a safe hub instead), where the controls are explained. I'm a guide at 2 sims listed in the destination guide as newbie friendly, and on an alt from time to time help out at a third. 99% of new avatars coming there: 1) never bother to ask questions 2) don't even bother to say "hi" when you greet them and or 3) are rude, abusive, and end up being ejected as griefers (luckily a small minority, probably repeat offenders coming back on new accounts every day or so). So many don't seem to want help, even when explicitly offered to them. For some, they could just be shy or have trouble with their user interface preventing them from chatting (but see above, that would have been explained in the tutorial sims or documentation they didn't bother with), but not most.

MoiselleErin Teardrop wrote: You know, sometimes people get into griefer things like say arguments or if someone is banned and seeking retaliation. It is a mystery why welcome centers are full of people who are there just to act like retards. What do they gain by crashing others or rezzing things like penises all over the place? I was at a track with two friends and we were playing this race game where if you took three hits to the back bumper your car exploded. Good fun. But soon some griefer was there and rezzed their "junk" everywhere. Griefers love to hit people who have no possible defense against them, don't know what hits them, and thus get the most upset. Those same people also don't know how to file ARs, or even that there's anything to file (many will think they just signed up for something that's fundamentally broken, that it's a problem with their viewer or the server rather than some **bleep** trying to crash the sim). Some of them do so because they get a kick out of hurting people, others are I know for a fact payed by competitors to hurt SL (and other companies, most any online community I've ever been a part of has them) and drive customers away. Same purpose as served by the constant flood of "SL is dead" posts, and signs in world in sims and peoples' profiles telling users to quit SL and go to XXX (whatever the creator/owner of the sign is promoting).

yes, would be ideal for stealing content from SL content creators... And for introducing griefing stuff into SL as well that the SL servers can't detect or prevent. Both of which of course are things we definitely don't want.

1) nobody can answer that for you 2) best ask in a specialised forum for creating such things 3) may have been pulled by the creator or LL for copyright infringement, or the creator/seller simply decided to remove it from sale for being too old and no longer reflecting his/her skills.

Tamara Artis wrote: The thing what bothers me is, as a person who is trying to design a place, I can't possibly know what ps specs are going to show up at my landing point. You mentioned 20 fps at an empty place, I get 70-80... In the beginning, when I just opened a place I was asking random people do they experience any lag there? All except one said no. But maybe I didn't ask enough... well said, and LL can't know either. That's why some people inevitably have problems where others don't. It's inevitable unless and until LL dictate a specific hardware config and software setup to run SL.

yes, the SSO system doesn't seem to quite remember whether people are signed in or not. Also get sometimes signed out of the marketplace for no apparent reason.

new LL Jira policies are pretty much standard across the world, and help prevent a ton of spam and fluff in Jira installations. Getting rid of all the gazillion griefer comments on entries intended only to show "how mad I am at LL for not fixing this 5 minutes after it was reported" (and we all know that's the majority of comments on the LL Jira) was probably the main reason. So to everyone who kept posting such drivel: thank you very much.

And there's a serious practical limit to the number of things you can put in a prim's inventory before it lags itself to pieces that's far lower than any theoretical limit imposed by the scripting language. A few dozen is probably what you want for low lag items, a few hundred at most (including all the scripts and notecards) as an upper limit.

oh, I've had friends call me in tears who got raped and were told they were pregnant by some talking you-know-what, including a message they can get an abortion if only they pay M*** A*** a good number of L$.

JohnMiddlefield wrote: The resell value for a full prim estate sim has "virtually" no value. This is because there is little demand for them since the large landowners can lease a full prim sim, giving the the one who leases it full admin right, with weekly payments instead of monthly, and at tier costs. That is how bad the market presently is. The main reason for owning an esate sim is to have the right to resell it to get some return on investment, but I tell you quite frankly, for the last 3 years, the resell value for an estate sim is virtually nill. for me at least, a very good reason would be to not be subject to the randomly changing rules of the owner, not having the risk of being kicked out when they feel like letting someone else have it instead (had that rl once, and heard it happening in sl), or when they decide to cash in on their business and close shop, leaving the sims dangling. The small financial gain by paying directly to LL rather than paying tier+a profit for the rental agency would be a nice bonus. If I could buy a homestead without buying a full sim first, I'd already have done so (full sim is over my budget).

16 wrote: there is no requirement in the ToS for you to do anything at all about the behaviour of another account holder you can if you like draw up a covenant for how your land is to be used by others. and kick them off your land if they break your covenant you can only be held accountable if you set up your sim to enable the ToS to be broken. like putting out a sign saying sexual child ageplayers welcome to rent here. stuff like that. not that you will though do this. just giving an example that said, I can see someone filing an AR against the sim owner for something the sim users/renters do there. LL would eventually indemnify you, but they might suspend you for a while until things are settled down.

On average I believe one in 20.000 clicks on an ad leads to a sale, that would be an SL account, not a premium account. I don't know how many percentage of new SL subscribers sign up for premium at the outset, probably no more than 1% (and that's generous). So that's 8.000.000 clicks a day he's generating. Unless he's running the ads on CNN and other major websites like that, I don't see that happening. More likely he's scamming both Google (by running click generators) and SL (by running some scam signing up premium accounts with credentials he knows will get rejected).

wonder if he got the im from the land owner, Linden Labs employee, or some random person trying to scare him into grief him...

Last time I think it was a few days until the backlog was filled (construction crews can't work 24/7, and aren't miracle workers). Might be a bit longer now as there's a weekend coming up. I like my Linden Home. It's a nice little bugout to jump to when chased by rolling restarts or to meet friends in private. Not having to spend part of my prim allowance on the land to put down a home is a nice bonus, as is having it in a controlled area with no noisy clubs and laggy megamalls all around eating up sim resources (especially script resources).

and of course other things factor in, size and shape of the parcel, what the neighbourhood looks like, is it flat, hillside, or some weird terraforming resulting from having been several terraced parcels in the past (you're not allowed to do much terraforming on mainland now). Roadside, flat, square parcels of decent size with nice neighbours are of course more desirable than odd shaped parcels with holes in them where half the land is on steep hills with laggy megamalls and clubs all around.